Welcome. Welcome to our kitchen table, which stretches from Warsaw to New York, and I think at least halfway around the world or perhaps all around the globe. I'm Helise Lieberman, the director of the Taube Center for the Renewal of Jewish Life in Poland. And I'm very pleased that you've all joined us for this very special TJHTalks and a special partnership with the Polish Museum of the History of Polish Jews and its annual TISH Food Festival. And now it's my pleasure to introduce a dear friend and colleague and Magdalena Maślak, the founder and coordinator of the TISH Jewish Food Festival.

Magda, It's lovely to share the table with you. Thank you. Thank you. Hello, everybody. Today is the first day of the third edition of TISH Jewish Food Festival.

And the main theme of the festival is closeness. And today we will talk about being close and staying close, especially in these difficult times that we are having right now, pandemic times and we are having today really extraordinary guests. So just not to make it longer, I would like to introduce Joy Levitt is the executive director at JCC in Manhattan. Hello, Joy.

And hi there, how are you?

And Katia Goldmann, the coauthor of the Community Table Cookbook and the unofficial Challah teacher of the Upper West Side. Hello, Katja. Hi, how are you? I'm fine, thank you and our great moderator the Ronald Lauder, chief curator of the core exhibition at Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. Hello, Barbara.

Hi there.

Ok, so not to take time of the of this meeting, I would give the voice to Barbara and to start the meeting.

Thank you very, very much. Well, first of all, we're absolutely delighted to have this opportunity to have a conversation with Joy Levitt and Katja Goldman.

I especially want to thank Helise Lieberman and Jakub Łysiak and the Taube Center in Warsaw for being our partner. And they are doing really wonderful work and have been for many, many, many years. And partnering with them is a tremendous pleasure. And they're providing really extraordinary resources in support of this conversation. Now, the starting point for this conversation was a cookbook in my collection.

And it is well, it's a JCC cookbook. It was organized by the Manhattan JCC. And it is in the general genre of community cookbooks. Many of them are charity cookbooks intended to raise funds.

And I have hundreds of them. But I have pride of place for the community cookbook.

And for what? For what it represents. And I thought we'd get our conversation started by inviting Joy to say a few words about how this cookbook represents the core values and the mission of the of the Manhattan JCC. And then we'll actually turn to a short video which will connect us with Katja.

Joy, do you want to say a few words?

Sure. Thanks, Barbara, and thank you, Helise and all of our friends that are helping connect us and reminding us just how small this world is. Full disclosure, for all the reasons you just said I started and want this book to happen, I thought it was going to be another spiral bound, a lot of chicken with French dressing. But and you'll hear more from Katja and Judy and Lisa. They were determined to express our 10th anniversary as an institution with all the values that we hold dear, about bringing people together, about the role of food and Jewish holidays and a Jewish life and and Shabbat. And they also, I think, very much wanted to express the marriage between this very deep value of community with the new ways in which we're thinking about food, both from the perspective of sustainability and health. And these ideas were brought into the imagination of the cookbook in ways that I think are make it pride of place for me as well.

And as I understand, cooking is part of the program at the JCC.

So the Patti Galman culinary studio at the JCC is the only kosher cooking school in New York City. And again, it is in a way a microcosm of of all of our values. The people who come to this class are come from all ages and stages. We have little kids making challah with their grandparents. We have young adults coming and meeting other young adults over food and often a glass of wine. And you get to meet people in those classes that you probably wouldn't meet under any other circumstances. But we get to meet them over food.

And as I understand, although it's a JCC, a Jewish Community Center, it's open to everybody.

The JCC is shaping 21st century Jewish life, which, as we all know, is multifaceted, multicultural, and we, as you'll see in the cookbook and has been true of Jewish cooking forever. And Barbara, you know this better than all of us. We've always benefited from being engaged in the culture that surrounds us and to and to bring in that culture into our unique way of eating.

Wonderful. Well, I think as a way of transitioning to a discussion of the cookbook and talking with Katja, let's show the video of the launch of the cookbook because it's a very joyous, festive launch of a real achievement.

We haven't seen this a long time.

We are celebrating the magnificent launch of the community table recipes and stories from the JCC in Manhattan and beyond.

And mostly it represents imagining how to express the values of the JCC and its mission. And a cookbook. We started out with a very broad base of what we wanted to do, and we started calling recipes from the community, from the cooking school and working and tweaking.

our own recipes, it's modern and it's contemporary and it's pretty much, you know, reflect how cooking is in New York in general. We kept asking ourselves with everything that's available online, why is anyone going to buy a cookbook? And there's something about physically holding the book, turning the pages to photography. You can't do that when you take a recipe offline. So I think there's a big need for cookbooks to continue in the tradition.

I would strongly recommend the chocolate brownie cookies with sea salt. They might be the best cookie I've ever had. There is also a great lentil soup that became our

item that we have had long cooking days, we always had the lentil soup on hand to be lunch, was working and cooking. It's healthy, it's organic, it's fresh and out of everybody's gardens. And I think this is going to be a really integral part of the many, many aspects of the JCC plays and people's Jewish lives.

I think that really is a perfect, absolutely perfect segue.

Katja, we haven't seen that since the book came out, right? Exactly.

It's perfect. It's absolutely perfect. Now, what I want to do, I want to as we begin to talk with Katja, I just want to say that it's a very, very back of the community cookbook is a really lovely moment. And it's called first of all, it's an excerpt from Katja's speech at the JCC, Manhattan's Annual Benefit in May 2012. It's only an excerpt. I'm eager to actually read the whole thing, but it's a beautiful excerpt and it is a recipe for a community center. And as I understand it, actually, you will tell us what happened after you made the speech.

Right after I made it. Well, first of all, I wasn't so comfortable with giving a speech. And this is a collaboration with Joy of coming up with this idea of just tell the story of the JCC since I was involved with it very early on of how it came to be at the 10th anniversary celebration. And I did it in the form of a recipe of listing the ingredients that you need. You know, inspiring people, a community, a corner, then you have to add a director, you have to move it to. Right. So when I finished mixing it and creating it and discussing how you just leave it on and let it rise and then you punch it down and you work it some more, and then you go down a few more floors. I came down from delivering it and Judy Bunzl, who you just saw it and not in the video, said to me, that's it, that's it. We're absolutely doing a book for this 10th anniversary. We're absolutely doing it. And and I kept saying I had written another cookbook and I said, you don't understand how much work this is. And we talked about it. And then I worked with Lisa Rotmil, who is a art historian and a great friend of mine, and she didn't know Judy. I said just come to a meeting, just come to a meeting, and we got Lisa to be a part of it. And the three of us worked together on this for I don't even know how long it was, but it was a couple of years where we would gather and just work together, discussing recipes, cooking together. It was like such a gift. The book is a gift to all of you, but it was a gift to us to be able to work together.

Well, you know, it's a very special book. And I say that knowing because I know I know a community cookbooks very well. And yes, most of them are very I mean, I can understand Joy's reluctance or hesitation. Most of them are cheaply printed, spiral bound, their recipes that are given by members of the community. And also they're really a kind of like a clock of American, Jewish and particularly suburban cooking. So whether it's tuna casseroles or it's, you know, jello salads or whatever, mayonnaise, whatever it may be, it is it's a different universe. So I can well understand that the prospect of such a cookbook to represent the Manhattan JCC was absolutely not in the cards. And so this definitely this is, of course, a very beautifully in terms of production values is very beautifully produced. But also it's a cuisine that really I would say it's not only very New York, it's also very California is very farm to table. It's very healthy. It's very fresh, it's seasonal, it's local. But also I am intrigued by how Jewish it is and how not Jewish it is. And I wondered whether you might like to comment on it Katja and then perhaps Joy I'd like to see something.

Well, we listen, Judy, and I come from different sort of areas of being Jewish and different homes and styles of cooking, and when we came together, we wanted this book to reflect who's walking through the doors of the JCC and what we're eating and who they are. So it crosses cultural and our visions of how we eat now. But it also holds on to a lot of where we where we come from. So Judy's a mother in law is a Viennese, I had Hungarian grandmother. There's a recipe for something called "nokedli".

I called it nake-nake. And I kept saying, it's a Hungarian spaetzle. I kept saying we have to include nake-nake. And Judy is like, what is nake-nake? And then we made and she goes, This is no Kitley. So we brought a lot of what we where we came from and the influences from other people in the community. But we and we also it's also about how we're cooking right now. We're not cooking with Jello. We're buying things seasonally as much as we can. There's farmer's markets. It's a reflection of our philosophy and how we feel about cooking.

Absolutely, before I would turn to Joy, just want to make some reflections of my own. So some of the memorable recipes and I would say surprises, which I think is really wonderful for this kind of a cookbook to be at once to have in it at once familiar, but also some very interesting surprises. So let me cite two of them. So my personal favorites are the Sri Lankan matzobrei.

Now, the idea of having a competition for matzobrei and then having a Sri Lankan entry and its way into the cookbook, I just thought that was so much of our moment because there are latke contests.

There are kugel contests. I don't know about bagel's but matzobrei. So that I thought and actually I'm going to try and make it because I really think that it's really good.

It's delicious. Delicious. But can you eat it when it's not Passover? That's how you know how good it is.

Exactly. Exactly. And especially after Passover when you've got all that matzo left. But the other one that I found so interesting was the deconstructed tzimmes. Now, the it was kind of like tzimmes reverse engineered. So what was it? It was essentially roasted root vegetables. And of course, traditionally at tzimmes is a stewed carrots, usually to a mush. Very, very soft, sweet, maybe with prunes, maybe with brisket, maybe with chicken. It's a lot more like a pudding. But this one was done with roasted vegetables and I think orange juice.

Absolutely stunning. Beautiful. Inspired by tzimmes, but not your grandmother's tzimmes. But I want to turn to Joy and I want to ask you the same question. You know, it is at the same time a very Jewish cookbook and at the same time not. And I just be interested in your thoughts.

Look, I think we're living in very disrupted times in which what Jewish identity is really about is becoming, I think, redefined in a really wonderful way as our community gets more multicultural and our experiences are deeper. So we're able to express that in our food instead of understanding Jewish cooking as Ashkenazi chicken soup. And I don't want to diss chicken soup. I do want to say while I'm on that subject, that I think Helen Nash is on on this on this call. I hope she has both. All of us have learned so much from Helen in terms of our cooking style. Helen has a great trick about making chicken soup more healthily, which is when the soup is finished, put a paper towel damp in a paper towel, stick it in the freezer for two minutes, bring it out, put it in your calendar and strain your soup. The fat congeals on the on the on the paper towel on the. I'm sorry, I'm a cold paper on the cold paper and you get a clear, beautiful soup. That being said, we've learned so much from our friends in Israel. I know, Smadar, that Akiva from JCC Global is on this call. The foods around the world have been have inspired us. So I think Jewish cooking is what how Jews cook and the interaction of that experience with the holy days that we have throughout the year. Because, let's face it, most of us are too busy to cook every day, although some of us I mean, Katja, I've been talking about how this cookbook has saved us during the pandemic when we wound up cooking for many more people than we used to. But it's holiday time when we really spend the time to cook deeply and being able to have those traditional favorites and also new things I think is what holds our families together.

Absolutely. And you know, a couple of things that I found very interesting in this cookbook, and that is to say that it doesn't bill itself. It isn't what I would call aggressively or assertively would be better. Word is not assertively kosher, but it is kosher and it's kosher in a very, I would say, gentle and non dogmatic way. And I think this is important, which is to say that it's not treif. That's how I put it. It's the not treif way of being kosher. Now, what is what does that mean? It means that it's very easy, and particularly with this farm to table and healthy way of cooking, that milk and meat are not mixed. For example, that pork and shellfish are not included, although there's another whole discussion as to whether a classic recipe really does call for bacon and if you're so inclined, be my guess kind of attitude. But I think the idea I mean, it is the way I put it is that when food is kosher, it is the most inclusive. It sounds exclusive, but it's not because what it means is that everybody can eat it. And that for me is actually so it being kosher is for me, a way of being inclusive, but doing so in a very gentle and very, I would say very easy way. That's that's the first thing. The second is that I thought it really interesting in the back of the book is that the recipes were classified as to whether they were milk or meat or neutral, that there were Passover recipes specifically. And then I also love the menus and the menu for Sukkot. I mean, let me just share with you the menu for Sukkot, because I think this will give our listeners a little bit of an idea. And of course, I wanted to ask each of you, what are you going to make for Sukkot, particularly from the cookbook?

But the menu for the meat dinner is crostini with three toppings, then a pickled string beans and baby carrots very much of the season, then Cajun barbecue brisket.

You have not lived until you have made this brisket.

And, of course, you know, like brisket is the trigger. And we know it has to be set and cut and that there's a whole way everybody has their favorite way. But I know, Joy, this is your go to. Then they're a roasted red pepper, tomato and parsley salad and a chocolate brownie. Your favorite recipes.

Some of them. Some of them. I know your husband won't eat peppers, but this is very, very nice dairy.

Very that you're given like an option. There's a kind of like a dairy lunch and then there's a meat dinner. So, Katja, what are you going  to make for Sukkot from the cookbook?

I'm making the tomato soup and one of the crostini is to go with it and then I was going to make a. It's just to be where I am in New York, it's just at the end, the last bits of corn and fresh like cherry tomatoes . So I'm making the papardelle, it's called the it's a late summer pasta dish. And then the salad we wrap, we everyone is go to is chicken cutlets or chicken breasts. And we presented four ways for each season of making different salad. So like the spring, it's shaved asparagus and a grilled chicken breast. And then and then we have delicata squash and different things. So I'm doing the fall salad without the chicken breast and a homemade ricotta to go on the crostini. And then for dessert, before we were live, we were discussing cookies and desserts. And when Hanukkah and Thanksgiving, which is an American holiday of Harvest Festival, happened on the same day many a couple of years ago, we came up with a pumpkin Rugelach recipe, which is really delicious. It's instead of using a jam, you use a pumpkin puree and spices. So that's one night of Sukkot. Sounds absolutely wonderful.

And you know what strikes me as I'm thinking about this is that I think that this cookbooks are a 21st century version of the most popular Jewish cookbooks of the 19th century.

And let me explain why. The most popular Jewish cookbooks of the 19th century were actually published in Germany, although they have recipes that are a little bit broader from the German speaking world. And what they were were extremely elegant cooking.

They were the gourmet cuisine of their time. And the idea was that you could cook this beautiful, beautiful food. And for the most part, except for the so-called Easter or Passover menu, they were called Jewish dishes. They were just simply wonderful. It was wonderful food, but it was wonderful food that was OK for the Jewish kitchen. And I think of this twenty first century and it was very contemporary, was contemporary to their time. And it was elegant, it was delicious. So in that way, I think this is not just in the tradition of charity cookbooks or community cookbooks, but also in the tradition of the history of Jewish cookbooks all the way from the 19th century. So I think that's a very, very, very interesting. Now, I have a question for the two of you, and that is you have some favorite dishes from your mother's mother, grandmothers that never made it into the cookbook. And I want to know, Joy, what are some of your favorite from your childhood recipes? And do you wish they had made it into the cookbook?

You know, the funny thing is my mother, who is 91 years old, never fails when she sits down to my Shabbat table, which she has done every week for the last six months, says to me, I don't know how I got children who cooks so well and what she means to say she was a terrible cook. Now, she wasn't a terrible cook, but this was just not interesting to her. And yet on Friday night, we always had chicken. And here's the recipe. Everybody get your pencils. It's very complicated. You take a cut of chicken, garlic powder, onion powder and paprika. You stick it in the oven for at three hundred fifty degrees for as long as it takes. And that's chicken.

So we that's what we grew up with. And when we used to go to take my kids to my mother's for Shabbat, she would make it. And for years my children go to desire was can we have grandma's chicken? And I would like, are you kidding? I've just made chicken marsala with Marsala from Spain and I'm getting all these. And you want grandma's chicken with the onion powder. Like, what is that about?

But we all know what that's about, right? That was about being grandma. And where was your grandma born? So my mother was born in the Bronx, but my grandmother was born in Warsaw and I had the same experience right when I was growing up. She would boil chicken and we would have chicken soup and then we would eat boiled chicken.

And to me, this was I don't know, this was cuisine.

This wasn't, this is, because it was love in a pot. That's what it was, right.

Love in a pot. Well said. Now, Katja, what about in your case?

Well, I grew up in a family where cooking was the sport. One side of my family had a Italian American grocery store and were importers in Brooklyn, and the other side was Hungarian and Austrian. So I had unbelievable cakes and delicious cooking going on in a Hungarian way. But I grew up thinking we were Italian because my grandmother came to holidays with stuffed shells and everybody in the family talked about sauce like whose sauce was better, whose gravy was better than the next one. So it was really a sport. When my family gets together, we cook and it's and as some people search out the ultimate, my family searched out the ultimate tomato. So I grew up with a lot of cooks and everybody, my siblings all cook and our children cook, it's a family thing. And we all have memories of my sister for breakfast, makes my grandmother's genius blintzes. And we each when we were got married and we're sitting out on our own, my grandmother gave us each a blintzes pan, a specific speckled and I was instructed, do not use this for anything else but blintzes, this is the pan. And when my daughter Doreen took over making the blintzes as I gave her my speckled pan.

Wow. Well in my case, my mother's side is from Brest-Litowski, which today is in Belarus.

But it was before the war, it was in Poland. And my father from Opatów, a town in south central Poland.

And it was my father's mother's cooking, my grandmother from my father's side that I remember well. And she was a good cook, but absolutely traditional, completely traditional. But everything very flavorful, everything very fresh. And it would be all the things you would expect because but what's very interesting is I remember in an earlier conversation that Joy you said about this cookbook: no kugel, I mean that in other words, what you were trying to suggest how this cookbook will be different from other, less interesting, you know, community cookbooks. It was kugel. But actually, you know, there are kugel contests also.

I noticed in the chat, Barbara, that Rabbi Naama Kelmann is on the on our video of who is the dean of Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem. She happens to be in New York visiting her grandchildren, but she wanted to know, is it kugel or kigel? And salty or sweet? And this is, you're an expert at this, Barbara.

It's, listen, it's both, it just depends on where you're from. But what the solution to a mixed marriage is not to make the salt and the sweet in the same one.

That's the only advice I have. I have that with my matzobrei: I cannot stand it sweet.

I can't either. And my husband's family eats it sweet. So  we have two pans going.

Oh that's a good solution. OK, now what I wanted to do, I want to turn to something that I found very surprising and delightful actually about the cookbook. And that is the way that it begins and it begins...

Oh, excuse me, Barbara.

I do have to correct something because I do see it in the chat. What Katja said was that she was not doing the chicken breasts. She was only doing the salad of the chicken breast because she's making a milchek meal. I just want to be really clear about that in the cookbook. It's a chicken pie with several different salads, depending on the season, but Katja is only making the salad. She's not making the chicken breast because you're quite right, we don't mix meat with milk. Sorry. 

But that's an important point about our cookbook. Yes. We tell you all throughout it that this dressing is not only good like a tahini dressing, it's delicious on this fall salad, but it's also delicious drizzled over a roasted cauliflower or make it in another way. So that is what I'm doing. I love that salad with the roasted squash and toasted pumpkin seeds so that I'm doing the salad without chicken in it.

Right. And actually what's wonderful about the recipes is that they are very easily adjusted for a meat meal, a dairy meal, whatever. It's very it's very, very easy to adjust them to so that you're not mixing milk and meat. So one of the things that I found really delightful and surprising, interesting about the book is the way it begins.

And that is it doesn't begin with appetizers. It begins with Challah. And which I think is a really, really interesting decision, I have some thoughts about it, but I wanted to ask Katja and then Joy about that choice, how did it happen and why did it happen? And why do you think that it was a good idea?

Well, I would say from my perspective, as you introduce Katja, is the she's not the unofficial she's the official Challah queen of priestess. I think I like I don't know, I find word of the Upper West Side. Around Jewish holidays, she could be making hundreds and sending them all over the world. I know that she's brought challahs to Israel for bar mitzvahs and weddings. And I will say a personal memory. When my dad died, my doorman called me and said, there's a bag here, downstairs for you. It was a challah from Katja. It's so much the way she has inspired all of us to think about the way in which this very Jewish symbol unites all of us with love and care. So from my perspective, starting  with challah, both represented this spirit that Katja and Judy and Lisa wanted to create in the book and start with, like, this is who we are.

And it's a symbol of community breaking bread together. I mean, you know, to bring people together and to sit down and to break bread together is what we try to represent in the book, community coming together, gathering around a table from wherever you come from, whatever is your background, what you bring to our table and break bread with us.

It's absolutely a brilliant way to go. And there is a kind of a, revival is the wrong word, but what I would say is that, of course, many people have been making their own challah. But by and large people buy a challah and the beauty of actually making it and making it as a family project involving kids in the making of it. But there are other there are other, I would call them holiday events whether there are workshops or just simply the collective experience and particularly women coming together and together baking challahs, that it is very much about bread and baking, baking bread, but also making it I think the process.

I think. Yes. And right now, for instance, in the pandemic, I don't know if you've been hearing this Katja, but the number of people making Challahs because their home has increased exponentially and Katja's recipe, which is actually, I guess, Doreen's recipe, which some it's not a grandmother recipe, from Santa Cruz or something. From a girl named Christine from Santa Cruz. Yeah. Yeah. But in fact it's gone viral, as I say, from Jonathan Orenstein, who's also on this call from JCC Cracow, like there are a lot of people making this recipe. It's something else about  because challah has, I guess how shall I say, on the one hand it's ancient.

So we're dealing with we're dealing with a Jewish tradition that has enormous historical depth. It has great historical depth, great religious significance. It's also a glorious, wonderful bread. So just simply from a sensory esthetic aspect, it's wonderful. And also it's very creative. And by that I mean that there is a really great folk traditions in terms of creating special colors for particular holidays, decorated challas. And they were documented by folklorist and ethnographers, you know, at the beginning of the 20th century. And we have really interesting photographs and diagrams of how to make a challah with a bird, with a key, with a ladder, how to make it around, how to make a 12 braided challah, the possibilities. And people have become very, very inventive. And so we asked Katja if she would bake for us a challah for Sukkot, and she did. So I would like to invite Katja please show us a challah and tell us about it.

So I baked two, because it's easier to see how I made a lulav. Can everyone see that? You can see how it comes together with all the seeds on it.

So you could really see you can see the palm fronds coming up the middle and the two different leaves coming on the sides, the myrtle and the different leaf shape and it is all brought together in braids and tied together like a lulav.

And so I made one without seeds, but I prefer the creativity of seeds. So I also made another one with the seeds so you can see how much fun you can have doing it. It's so creative, so beautiful. Yeah, and for each family event, like for weddings I do two rings that overlap and one is there is a braid that has dark seeds on it and the other has light seeds on it and then some zaatar. So it's like the bride and the groom uniting and adding the spice of zaatar for a life filled with excitement and spice. It's wonderful.

It's so creative.

I mean, on the one hand, even the traditional, what you might call the traditional challahs were themselves very creative, multiple braids, these decorations. I remember interviewing an older, an old woman in Toronto in the 60s when I was doing some ethnographic research, and she showed me how to make these little challah birds that they would have, say, a little bit of leftover and she'd make a coil. She tied the knot. Then she'd pinch out the beak, put a little peppercorns for the eyes. And then she had for all the kids. She had the little bird challahs. I mean, they're just, you know, even within the tradition, there was a kind of creativity. And so to see that impulse you carried through in this great, beautiful, loving way and so appropriate for the holiday so you can have a lulav challah and then this beautiful Creole brisket and  and.

Yes, why not? It's who we are. And Joy I'm with you.

Jewish is as Jewish does. Katja somebody is asking in the chat about using a convection oven for challah. She wants to know, can you or should you just not?

I prefer if you have a convection oven that you can turn the fan in the convection oven on or off. I think it's better to put it in without the convection fan going so that it rises properly for the first 15, 20 minutes. And then you can put the convection on so that it has a more even baking. But I prefer not to have the fan going because it sometimes interferes with the rising, at least in a convection oven that I've used.

Exactly what the convection oven does is it forms the crust too quickly and it means that that whole inside won't rise properly.

Yeah, that's exactly. So I think at this moment I'd like to introduce the other two coauthors who were kind enough to join us. So if we could bring them up, that would be, that would be just great.  Let me see if I can see them myself. Gallery view. OK, our other two authors. I think are the two others could make sure their video is turned on and their microphone is turned on and can Kuba do that for us.

There's Lisa, although I don't see your picture there.

So while we're waiting because I love Katja said... You know, I can't hear Barbara. I'm on.. I got you now. OK, so when Katja was talking with us about the project, she referred to the troika as the fork, knife and spoon. That's right. I wonder who at least in that cutlery set you.

I was the knife. 

Lisa. Why were you the knife? Oh, there is Judy. Oh, hi, Judy. Hi. Could take yourself off mute, Judy?

I guess because you know when you get three women together talking about food it can kind of continue on and on for quite a lot of time. And so it's up to me to kind of bring everybody back to point and to say we've got to move through this. So I did a lot of the... We all edited together, but I would say that one of my roles was to keep us on task and to keep cutting so that we could actually finish this production.

In other words, you had to cut to the quick. Exactly. Well said. Wow. So now of the fork, knife and spoon, Judy.

What were you. I was fork. Why? Because I was constantly shoveling food in my mouth.

Oh.

Happily tasting everything that we were doing to test recipes for.

Ok, and so then that means that you had to have been the spoon?

Yeah, I was a spoon because I just kept cooking, I just kept cooking. And I think of Judy as the fork because she was always pushing us to tweak the taste to get it right, like just poke it a little better, get it like make sure that it was really right. I know we enjoyed a lot of good meals, but I think Judy was always pushing us to get it. The taste exactly right or not so much tarragon. She wanted more salt. Exactly. Judy and I were constantly bringing more recipes and more recipes. And Lisa would be the knife in a way like, OK, that's enough. We don't need any more cookie test now.

Well, certainly my waistline couldn't take any more cookie test.

So actually, what strikes me is that your collaboration is also very much in the spirit of the JCC, and that is that you are very diverse. The three of you come from very different backgrounds, personal histories, different relationships to cooking and food in terms professionally. But also I think that the fruitfulness of the collaboration is itself a message that you were able to work so effectively together to be so complementary in terms of your sensibilities and your expertize. And I would say in the spirit of collaboration, which I just I think the book is a testament to that and also very much in the spirit of the JCC itself. So my question to you, Lisa, and to Judy, is, were there any real surprises that arose out of this collaboration, anything that came as a real surprise, Lisa?

I guess, you know, I think that it's a very rare moment when you can meet up with your peers or your friends or your colleagues in this way and being part of each other's lives week in, week out with something extremely rare and really very valuable. And, you know, you know what goes on in the kitchen, right? You start schmoozing and tasting and schmoozing. And we really I think we spent about three years in each other's kitchens and the support and the closeness was, of course, something that we hoped for, but we I don't think we really understood the depth of what that experience bred in all of us and the depth of our connections to each other and to each other's families. Lovely, and Judy?

I agree with everything Lisa has said, and I would add, as you talked about, that the cookbook really expressed the full diversity of the JCC. It really was represented to a large degree with the three of us. I grew up in a superficially Jewish home. Certainly, I knew very little about kosher cooking. And I think USQUE surprises. One of the surprises was how much I could learn from Lisa and from Katja and how we shared each other's values and what cooking mentor families within them, the Jewish continuity. But for me, food in general is an incredibly important part of my family life. But the book brought, I have to say, a lot more Jewish content into my family's kitchen. And for both my daughters starting their own homes, it's a big part of their homes now. And I have to thank Lisa and Katja and, of course, join the JCC for reminding me how food really can bring a new level of Jewishness into family life.

That's very, very good to hear and Katja for you?

I think that we all know each other. I mean, I knew Lisa and I knew Judy, but they didn't know each other. And the way that we came together and it was never drudgery. It was always an exciting day to be doing this together. And the joys the picture has a lot. The book has a lot of pictures that were taken, Judy, even though we live in the city, Judy lives just in Riverdale. So she has a house in a backyard and a spectacular garden. And it was just the whole thing was just an incredible celebration of living through cooking and lives with each other. It was a wonderful, wonderful experience. And we really worked hard. We all felt committed to having this be something that you didn't want to put down. And that was beautiful.

One of those cookbooks that people who don't cook read. I want to emphasize that, you know, I never thought about this, but if Katja was the spoon and Lisa was the knife and Judy was the fork, I was the plate to stay for a year. I went through this the galleys of this cookbook trying literally every recipe and calling them sometimes quite early in the morning or late at night and saying this recipe doesn't make sense. There's too much of this. There's too little of that. But I guess what I want to emphasize is this is a cookbook for nonprofessional cooks. It's interesting. It's terrific. But the ingredients, you can all find them and and it's very super clear. So if you love to cook, you're going to love this cookbook. But it's not it's not overwhelming. Everybody should just hear that. Although these ladies are extraordinary cooks, I wouldn't call them home cooks. The cookbook was really written for everybody who loves to cook. And I understand that you cooked every single recipy. Everything! Some things I had to farm out. As you said, my husband doesn't like my peppers so that that paprikarz recipe, which I think was Judi's was Nick's grandmother's or something. I mean, some of these foods did come from these families, but then got a new and modern twist. That's right.

Absolutely. It was very clear. Well, I think that at this moment it's time for us to open the discussion and invite questions and give you the opportunity to respond. So I'd like to keep everybody up. Lisa. Judy Catedral, I'd like to keep all of you up and let's see what questions we're getting now from our distinguished visitors.

Um, I've got two questions for you.

One of the questions is, what is your favorite fish recipe in the book, and the question is to all the ladies.

Ok, so let's see. Let's maybe start, shall we? Let's start, Judy. We'll start with you and then we'll go to Lisa, to Katja and to Joy.

Hands down the fish tacos. I love those fish tacos. It's a fun recipe to cook. It's very communal. When you put all the ingredients out and people can choose which ones they want to include, it becomes festive even if it is just a regular gathering. That's my favorite fish recipe.

And Lisa? That's hard, I think I really love the steamed salmon with Shahd, which is like a very simple go to weeknight perfect kind of fish where the fish is just tender and flaky and it comes with a little sauce.

You can use that sauce on vegetables, you can put it over rice.

And it's just a very it's a real go to recipe, I think. Lovely. Katja?

Well, those two are two of my favorites. We made the fish tacos. We make them made it weekly all through my younger children's high school days when we finish this cookbook. But I also love and I was never an abolute lover of gefilte fish. And every year my my grandmother would make it and then my mother in law made it. But there's a salmon, halibut, gefilte fish that I make even not for Passover or specific holidays. It's delicious with a beet apple horseradish.

That sounds great. And, you know, it's interesting in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, they do make they have in the charity cookbooks from that region there, they're gefilte fish is made with salmon.

It's pink. Can you imagine two tones pink gefilte fish with beet horseradish? I actually think that's that's a winner. Joy? it's the halibut with Marcona almonds. It's grilled and you're supposed to use figs. But here is a place where I can't find figs. I don't know, ladies, tell me if this was OK. I use plums.

Why not? Perfect. Why not make it?

Ok, so now thank you that all of them sound great and that they're not the only recipes that use fish in the cookbook, but they all sound wonderful. So now the question had to do with the impact of the influence of Polish cuisine on Ashkenazim cuisine. I would really, if you forgive me, I would take the liberty of informulating the question. And that is it would have to do with not the influence of one on the other, which suggests that Jewish cuisine is derivative. It is what it is because other cuisines made it what it is. I would I would you formulate the question as what is Polish know? What is the cuisine of Polish Jews and then and what what you would my starting point would be what do they share? They share climate, they share raw ingredients. They share certain technologies in terms of ovens and stoves. They they share they share the seasons. And so what what interests me are, if you will, the variations and permutations on dishes that they share. And so it's not a matter of who influenced whom and which was the original and which was borrowed, etc. I don't think of it that way at all. So, you know, whether we're talking about borszcz or we're talking about karp or we're talking about Pirogi or knedlach or kreplach or whatever we may be talking about, I'm more interested in understanding these cuisines as living together and as being what I would call symbiotic, that they they are in a constant dialog and that these communities are adapting to local circumstances and to each other. So the shared repertoire is amazing. And then the variations are really interesting. And a good place to look honestly is the Christmas Eve Polish, the Polish Christmas Eve meatless dinner, and you'll see a lot of connections there, among other places. So that's how that's where I'd go with that question. OK, do we have another question?

Now, that's the all the questions we got.

Ok, so let me ask this to our panelists, I want to ask each other any questions.

What's the next cookbook, ladies?

I can't believe you're asking us that, you know how many times we've talked about writing another cookbook, really caveats, mind you.

I'm curious that if indeed you were what? Because I'm assuming that, as you think about doing quote another one, you have some thoughts on what it might be. What are some of the thoughts on what it might be?

I'm going to go out on a limb here, Joy, I'll apologize in advance, but and to my two coauthors, you had mentioned, Barbara, earlier on about inclusion of bacon in something and not that I was suggesting including bacon, but I did want to have a sidebar in some of the recipes about if you don't keep a kosher home. And it generated a really meaningful and very interesting conversation among all of us and I if I was to write another cookbook with these two amazing women, I might push a little harder for a sidebar.

I got voted down on that one, but it really brought to me the.

The importance of a kosher home for Katja and Lisa in a beautiful way and Joy as well in a beautiful way, that is not something I follow, but it helped me develop a very different and enlightened, I should say, respect for the homes that they keep and the traditions that they all keep.

Can I ask you, like, is there something that you have learned about food since I mean, the book has been out now for I don't know, I mean, five right now. 2015, right? Five years. So is there are you cooking any differently Judy - your garden has grown exponentially. Katja, you have a farm. Are there different ways that you're thinking about food than you originally thought about it? Or it's just it's on the same trajectory.

Well, I think if I can go, I think. Everyone always thinks of the year as four seasons and there is a it's really six seasons and there is a cookbook that Judy and I have, I think Lisa might have it, too, that was written discussing how their six seasons. And I think we debated about having the book be according to season and what's available now. So I think that might be something that would come into the framework of how we would do it. But it's also still the same message as what the first cookbook is, which is what we're cooking now. I mean, everything keeps evolving and you keep coming up with different and new ideas and different influences constantly. The one change would be that, as you know, we have stories from JCCs across the country and their associations with food.

I think if we were to do the book now, I would go globally. I would go to the JCC in Warsaw, I would go to the JCC in Krakow, I would go to JCC in Israel. And then we, of course, have to travel to these places. God like we can travel again.  But I think the stories are such a rich part of the cookbook.

Absolutely. If I just might say that JCC Warsaw one of its most popular and most successful programs is Boker Tov, which is an all day Sunday brunch. When I say that kosher is very inclusive, needless to say, vegetarian is even more so and vegan even more so. And so the way they actually they go they go with the most inclusive, which is to say meatless kind of cuisine, and they get a beautiful turn out and people hang out there all day and they serve this really kind of an Israeli style mezze kind of menu buffet all day long. And I do think I think it'd be a beautiful idea to do JCC global. I just think that would be stunning. And I know that the JCC in Krakow also does all kinds of interesting food programing and their Sabbath dinners with six hundred plus people gathered together on one Friday night during the Krakow Jewish Culture Festival is just phenomenal.

And I know that they've also done challah workshops and I think Keesha cooks for that festival. Right. Somebody wants to know whether you invented these recipes? Are you tweaked existing ones?

And if we can't, just before that Lisa, I just wanted to get what you would imagine in a new cookbook and then we can go to the Joy.

Well, I know Katja and I have talked a lot about a Shabbat dinner cookbook, but I think I mean, even Shabbat dinner around the world would kind of be very interesting if we tried to coordinate or combine a lot of the different ideas that we're talking about, because, you know, Shabbat dinner is just a time to bring diverse people into your into your home. And and that's the concept that works for anyone. It doesn't have to be Shabbat. It doesn't have to have a religious significance to it.

But it's just a great excuse to bring people together regularly. And I think particularly now during the pandemic, when we're missing that kind of connection so much, I think we could combine a lot of these different ideas and come up with something really great. So I think I'm really sorry, but I'm going to have to sign off. But I want to thank you so much for letting me be part of this. This was a great walk down memory lane and got me very excited and whetted my appetite, so to speak. So thank you guys. Love to everyone and Shana Tova, wishing everyone health and happiness.

Thank you very much, Lisa. Unfortunately have to clear the table.

Is there any last words you'd like to share with us?

You've certainly brought us closer and you've whet our appetites and our imaginations.

So now, just before we sign off, Joy, was there a question that had come from you or did it come from you before?

I think it was just a question about whether they these recipes are all new or whether they were tweaked from existing recipes.

I think both. I think the answer is both. Yeah, I think the answer is both. So now turning to Helise and Magda, I think that if I'm not mistaken, you want to bring this to a close that. Right?

Bring it to a close, but I'm afraid that we might have to. First of all, thank you all so much for coming together with TISH, Magda Barbara, you are amazing. If we have the fork, knife and spoon, you're definitely that cooked that big kitchen spoon that stirs us all. And we are very grateful that you set such a beautiful table for all of us. I don't think there's anyone on the call who wants to let go of the connection. And I'm sure that many people will find their way to the cookbook and have been inspired to think about community and how we cook and eat and share food together. Really, I can't thank you enough on behalf of TJHTour talks. And I am so delighted that we've been able to partner with TISH this year and look forward to many more partnerships. I would like to give you a little hint that if you tune in on Friday, you will get to see rainbow challah being braided by the JCC in cooperation with TSIH, am I right?

Yes, you're right, and also I wanted to tell you that all the online events of TISH are available with English subtitles, so you can watch everything and you can join us during all the days of this.

Yes. And I think that one of the things that this year has been exemplary is to provide all programing in Polish and English.

The English language programing debuts in English, but then it is rebroadcast with Polish subtitles because it takes time for the museum to prepare the Polish subtitles. So if you want them with Polish subtitles, just look for the rebroadcast in the in the TISH Food Festival program. And as for the Polish programing, if it's YouTube, there's a closed caption option and you can choose a language English, it'll automatically bring up English subtitles. So we are a bilingual museum is very, very important for us to be able to communicate fully in both Polish and English and to bring our Polish and English language audiences together. So I personally want to thank the Taube Center in Warsaw for partnering with Polish Museum. We are enormously grateful to you for your cooperation. I want to thank Kuba especially for providing all the technical support and Helise for leading this entire center. And I want to thank Magda, who I think has created our food programing for POLIN Museum with great imagination and is doing a wonderful job on the TISH Food Festival and done so beautifully and with such imagination. So and of course, I want to thank our guests. I want to thank Katja. I want to thank Joy. I want to thank the fork, the knife, the spoon and the plate. Thank you very, very much. I thought this was a wonderful session and I cannot thank you.

Thank you all.

Shana Tova a good year. And we hope to see you on our next session in two weeks. And by the way, you have to visit us during your global tour to create the recipes.

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